Peter May - The Lewis Man

As they walked up the drive, Fin noticed the security lights and CCTV cameras mounted around the house and in the grounds. Paul Kelly was evidently keen to avoid unwanted visitors. The front door opened as they reached the entrance porch, and a young man in an open-necked white shirt and sharply creased grey trousers folding neatly over Italian shoes surveyed them with cautious eyes. His black hair was cut short, and gelled back from his forehead. An expensive haircut. Fin could smell his aftershave from six feet away.

‘Need tae frisk you.’

Without a word Fin moved forward, legs apart, arms raised to either side. The young man patted him down carefully, front and back, along each arm and down each leg.

‘The woman, too.’

Fin said, ‘She’s clean.’

‘I need to check.’

‘Take my word for it.’

The young man looked at him very directly. ‘More than my job’s worth, pal.’

‘It’s okay,’ Marsaili said. And she presented herself for the search.

Fin watched with a simmering anger as the man put his hands on her. Front and back, buttocks, legs. But he didn’t linger where he didn’t have to. Professional. Marsaili remained expressionless, although her face coloured slightly.

‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘Follow me.’

He took them through a cream and pale-peach hallway with a thick red carpet and a beechwood staircase rising through two floors.

Paul Kelly was lounging on a white leather settee in the conservatory at the rear of the house smoking a very large Havana cigar. Although a light breeze rustled through the spring leaves in the garden outside, Kelly’s smoke hung in still strands, blue-grey where it was caught by the sunlight that angled through the trees. There was an impression here almost of being in the garden itself, although you could neither smell nor hear it. Red plush armchairs sat around a brushed steel table, and bright daylight reflected off a polished wooden floor.

Kelly stood as his flunky showed them in. He was a giant of a man, well over six feet tall, and although a little overweight still in good condition for someone in his mid to late sixties. His florid round face was shaved to a shine, steel-grey hair cropped to bristle. His starched pink shirt was stretched a little too tightly over an ample belly, his jeans ironed to an incongruous crease.

He smiled, a slight query in the tilt of his head, and he offered a large hand to each of them in turn. ‘An ex-cop and tales of the Dean Bridge. I must admit, you’ve aroused my curiosity.’ He waved the same big hand towards the red armchairs. ‘Take a seat. Can I offer you something to drink? Tea? Coffee?’

Fin shook his head, ‘No thanks.’ He and Marsaili perched uncomfortably on the edge of the armchairs. ‘We’re trying to establish the identity of a man, now living on the Isle of Lewis, who was at the Dean Orphanage some time in the mid 1950s.’

Kelly laughed. ‘Sure you’re not still in the force? You don’t sound like an ex -cop to me.’ He sank back into his white settee.

‘I can assure you I am.’

‘Well, then, I’ll take your word for it.’ He drew reflectively on his cigar. ‘What makes you think I can help?’

‘Your family was living in old millworkers’ tenements in the Dean Village at that time.’

Kelly nodded. ‘We were.’ He chuckled. ‘Wouldn’t recognize the place now, though. A yuppie paradise it is these days.’ He paused. ‘Why do you think I would know some boy from The Dean?’

‘Because I believe he was involved in an incident on the Dean Bridge that affected your family.’

There was the merest flicker of something in Kelly’s eyes, the slightest heightening of the colour on his face. Fin wondered if it was pain he saw there. ‘What’s his name?’

Marsaili said, ‘Tormod Macdonald.’ And Fin flicked her a look.

He said quickly, ‘But you wouldn’t know him by that name.’

Kelly’s eyes turned towards Marsaili. ‘What’s he to you, this man?’

‘He’s my father.’

The silence that ensued hung heavy in the air, like Kelly’s cigar smoke, and lingered for longer than was comfortable. Finally, Kelly said, ‘I’m sorry. This is something I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget. It’s not easy to lose a big brother so young. Especially when he was your hero, too.’ He shook his head. ‘Patrick meant the world to me.’

Fin nodded. He said, ‘We think the boy’s first name was John. Something. That’s what we’re trying to find out.’

Kelly took a long slow pull on his cigar and let the smoke leak from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth before blowing a grey stream of it into the pregnant atmosphere of the conservatory. ‘John McBride,’ he said at last.

Fin tried to control his breathing. ‘You knew him?’

‘Not personally. I wasn’t on the bridge that night. But three of my brothers were.’

‘When Patrick fell to his death?’ Marsaili said.

Kelly turned his focus from Fin to Marsaili. His voice was barely audible. ‘Yes.’ He sucked in some more smoke, and Fin was shocked to see what looked almost like moisture gathering in his eyes. ‘But I haven’t talked about that in more than fifty years. And I’m not sure I want to start now.’

Marsaili nodded. ‘I’m sorry. I can understand that.’

They walked in silence up Tipperlinn Road, stone villas brooding privately behind high walls and tall trees, past the old coach-house at Stable Lane to where the cobbled Albert Terrace ran off up the hill to their right in a profusion of green.

Eventually, Marsaili could no longer contain herself. ‘What do you think really happened on the Dean Bridge that night?’

Fin shook his head. ‘Impossible to know. Everyone who was there is dead. Except for your father. And maybe Ceit. Though we have no idea whether she’s still alive or not.’

‘At least we know now who my father is. Or was.’

Fin looked at her. ‘I wish you hadn’t told him your dad’s name.’

The blood drained from her face immediately. ‘Why?’

He sighed deeply. ‘I don’t know, Marsaili. I just wish you hadn’t.’

Fin looked down out of the late afternoon at the ragged fingers of rock that reached out into the Minch, water breaking white all around them. Peat bog stretched away into the island’s interior, scored and scarred by centuries of cutting. Loch a Tuath reflected the darkly ominous clouds gathering overhead, ridged by the wind through which the small British Airways plane fought bravely to achieve a smooth landing on the short runway at Stornoway airport. The same wind that whipped about them now in the car park as they threw their overnight bags in the boot and sought shelter in Fin’s car from the first heavy drops of rain blowing across the moor from the west.

Fin started the engine and set the wipers going. It had taken them almost no time at the ScotlandsPeople Centre of the National Archives of Scotland to track down John William and Peter Angus McBride, born 1940 and 1941 respectively, in the Slateford district of Edinburgh to Mary Elizabeth Rafferty and John Anthony McBride. John Anthony had died in 1944 while serving in the Royal Navy. Mary Elizabeth eleven years later from heart failure, the cause of which was not specified. Marsaili had paid for extracts of birth and death certificates for the entire family, and slipped them into a buff envelope that was tucked away now in the bag she held to her chest in the passenger seat.

Fin had no real idea how it was affecting her. She had said nothing throughout the flight back to the islands. He could only guess that she was reassessing everything she had ever known or thought about herself. She had just found out that although born and brought up on the Isle of Lewis she had, after all, no island blood in her. An English mother, a mainland father from a Catholic family in Edinburgh who had fabricated his entire life. It was a revelation.